Jiří Zelenka

"In Žatec, I had an apartment in a villa in the attic, which was arranged by my manager at work. There was no bell, and when someone came to see me, he rang the bell for the neighbours downstairs, they let him in and knocked on my door upstairs. And one time, he knocked on my door like that, and there was a State Security officer there. His name was Havelka, and he immediately stuck his foot in my door and rushed in. I had on my desk at the time... At that time, I wrote some of my things there, poems I called them. I even had an unfinished novel out. And he got right to it. We got into a fight, really, not a fist fight, but just kind of a little fight. And he was like, 'You're gonna be in trouble, we finally got you... That's assaulting a public servant.' But I really should have... He took the papers and ran out of my flat, running off with the papers. That's when I got scared. So I quickly took the typewriter and stuff like that out of the apartment, gave it away or hid it with somebody. But then I realised, because then I talked to Skalák or somebody, and he says, 'Don't worry about it at all, he broke in. He actually robbed you. He didn't have a warrant, nothing. Don't worry about anything at all,' and that's what happened."

"I used to go to the yard in sweatpants. There was an officer walking, I don't know what batch it was, and when I saw him, I took a rock and threw it at him in a way so I wouldn't hit him. Well, trouble right away, right, huge... And the doctor comes in and he says, 'He threw a rock, that's trouble, there's going to be a trial.' And the doctor says, 'Yeah, but it says here in the papers that he's been released from the mental hospital.' And he says, 'Oh, I see, he will go to the military mental hospital then.'" - "So you threw that on purpose? To confirm your insanity?" - "And so they took me to Brno, to the military mental hospital, and I was there for about a month or however long, and the doctor there already knew too, and he says, 'Either you come home and lose your car papers, or you keep your car papers and stay in the military. So what's your choice?' So that was an obvious choice, and they let me go." - "So you got a blue [booklet]?" - "I didn't get a blue because there was this thing... I had to get checked the next year, so I had another deferment. I went for a check again. In the meantime, I had appointments with Mrs Sosnová, a psychiatrist. She basically advised me, or she didn't even advise me, but she wrote what I wanted her to write there herself."